In Twenty 20-Fav, we’re spending 2025 examining the work of actor/director Jon Favreau. In this entry, Favs defects from Marvel and teams up with Steven Spielberg on a project that is way less fun than the title suggests.
Astute readers of this column (I’m sure you’re out there) will recall in my piece on Leatherheads that Favreau once had a screenplay in his back pocket titled “The Marshal of Revelation”, which he said would have featured “a Hasidic gunfighter in the Old West”. Cowboys & Aliens is definitely not that film, and it’s nothing even half as interesting as that premise suggests. Hell, Cowboys & Aliens isn’t even as interesting as a movie featuring both cowboys and aliens should rightly be. The only reason I even bring it up is to say that Favreau finally gets to scratch that itch with Cowboys & Aliens.
Cowboys & Aliens comes from Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, a one-time comic producer who pitched the project to Universal and Dreamworks as far back as 19971. (Incidentally, Gary Larson explored the idea in a Far Side comic strip from 1994.) The project bounced around for about a decade without much progress. In 2006, Rosenberg finally published “Cowboys & Aliens” as a graphic novel, which renewed interest from Dreamworks. Steven Spielberg came on as a producer, the screenplay underwent several drafts before a finished version emerged from Transformers team Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci. Damon Lindelof also contributed, along with Iron Man writers Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby.
With so many cooks in this kitchen, and Spielberg counting himself among them, this thing feels engineered to appeal to as broad a global audience as possible. Problem is, the movie is so broad that I can’t rightly say it appealed to anybody. It’s too grim and self-serious for eight-year-old boys, but also too weird and science fiction-y for grandpa. This, effectively, is a film for nobody. It’s one of those random summer blockbusters from the era when studios had to fill their schedules with something, ideas be damned.
The story finds a man waking up in the middle of the desert wearing a mysterious alien gauntlet on his wrist, with no recollection of how or why he got there. This is Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig), who stumbles into the nearby town of Absolution, a dying mining town lorded over by asshole cattleman Woodrow Dolarhyde2 (Harrison Ford). Lonergan finds himself in the middle of a spat between Dolarhyde’s idiot son Percy (Paul Dano) and the town doctor/barkeep, Doc (Sam Rockwell). After Percy and Lonergan get locked up by the town sheriff (Keith Carradine), Dolarhyde rolls into town to retrieve his son, and at that exact moment the entire town is attacked by UFOs. Aliens! In this western! Wow!
Lonergan suddenly discovers the purpose of the gauntlet on his wrist and blasts one of the alien ships out of the sky. This attracts the attention of a young woman named Ella (Olivia Wilde), who may or may not know what’s going on with Lonergan. The aliens kidnap a bunch of people, among them the sheriff and Doc’s wife, and everyone agrees to put aside their differences and give chase. They soon find themselves held captive by Apaches, who confer with Dolarhyde’s right hand man, Nat (Adam Beach), and explain that the aliens are here to harvest our gold. Ella corroborates this, as she turns out to be alien herself, here to stop the other aliens from doing to Earth what they did to her planet.
The irony that this is exactly what white settlers did to the Native Americans during the push westward seems completely lost on the characters in this film. The idea is there if you want to read between the lines, but no one ever comments on it, or even acknowledges this. Which is an odd choice considering Rosenberg’s original graphic novel makes this idea explicitly clear from page one. The comic says “This is 100% the thing we’re doing here.” The movie either trusts its audience to connect those dots themselves, or flat out just doesn’t see them in the first place. It’s difficult to tell which. It’s probably another symptom of the movie being intentionally engineered for global audiences who probably don’t care about that facet of American history. Or maybe I’m just bored with this movie and looking for nits to pick.
That’s really the problem for me here. Cowboys & Aliens is just a hair shy of two hours long, and there is absolutely nothing interesting going on in it. You take every conceivable western character type you can find—the mysterious stranger wandering into town, the evil rancher ruling people with an iron fist, the struggling couple just trying to make ends meet, the Native struggling to gain acceptance from white people, the kid who wants to prove he’s a man, the woman who wants to prove she’s not just some woman (but also in this case cuz she’s also an alien)—and instead of bouncing any of these characters off one another, the movie says “all these conflicts are less important than stopping an alien gold rush”. Which is made even worse because the alien gold rush angle is only barely developed in the first place.
If I have one overarching criticism of this movie, it’s that none of it feels particularly developed. I can’t even rightly say “it’s not well-developed”, because that would require things to be developed in the first place. Cowboys & Aliens is the idea of a movie farted out onto the screen without rhyme or reason. I’m sure everyone on set had a blast getting to make a western, which in this day and age is a rarity. But it’s mere existence as a western released in 2011 is not enough for me to give this movie a pass.
THE FAVREAU DIMENSION
At one time, Robert Downey, Jr. was attached to Cowboys & Aliens. He told Favreau all about it on the set of Iron Man 2. Favreau’s interest in the material was piqued, so he took his pitch to Dreamworks and Steven Spielberg, landing the gig just in time for his exodus from Kevin Feige’s Big Marvel Machine. While Favreau struggled with the demands of a cramped production schedule and Marvel using his film to move around chess pieces, here he seems liberated from all that nonsense and focused on delivering some glossy, surface-level cheese. He seems to genuinely enjoy getting to make a western. If only the script had given him more to work with.
Have to once again give Favs props for bringing back a couple of past co-stars. Sam Rockwell, of course, we just saw in Iron Man 2, as well as his brief appearance in Made. And Adam Beach, who we last saw way back in The Big Empty.
And as for Favreau’s exit from Marvel? He’ll be back eventually. They always come back…
FINAL RATING
2 stars (out of five). S’not so good. S’not so good at all.
NEXT TIME: Bit player Jon Favreau returns!
- At the time, Dreamworks was in production of another film featuring Jon Favreau, Deep Impact.
↩︎ - Credit where it’s due: Woodrow Dolarhyde might be the best name for a western character I’ve ever heard. ↩︎
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